I use KDE. Some use GNOME. Most other options are probably to be left out as X11 is unsafe.
Cosmic is not nearly finished, but will probably be a bit safer, as its in rust, even though not tested.
Then there are window managers like Sway, Hyprland, waymonad, wayfire, etc.
RaspberryPi also has their own Wayland Desktop.
Is every Wayland Desktop / WM equally safe, what are other variables here like language, features, control over permissions, etc?
Made in Rust is not synonym of safety. Every code is as safe as its programmer made it be.
It’s also as safe as the user allows. You can put in all the safety measures but that means nothing if the use disables them for convenience.
I don’t think security comes from your desktop
You really should press Ctrl+alt+f3 on your lock screen and get your mind blown.
That leaves the desktop running in a parallel session
I think you missed the point. Switch the tty to realize your de is irrelevant in regards to security, because you don’t even need one…
I would love to only use the computer in tty but would be hard to edit images in GIMP. Or do you still launch GUI apps directly from tty? Most websites are an abomination viewed through lynx or similar.
What the duck has this to do with anything.
The entire point is that your DE has NO security features at all, those come ALL from the underlying system such as PAM for example, managing the authentication and such.
These stupid strawmans “huhr dur watch a video”
Besides that I’ll just answer the straw man argument anyway because it’s even stupid if you take it seriously YES YOU DO ACTUALLY LAUNCH GUI DIRECTLY FROM TTY.
Sorry I don’t understand what this means. I am not a computer whiz but just like the simplicity of typing things versus navigating menus.
This is not a very good question. If you are concerned about security you need to think about what specifically you are trying to keep safe? Here are some examples of different security scenarios:
- Do you want your computer to be safe when it is stolen?
- Do you want to run lots of native apps from untrusted sources?
- Do you want it to be used by many people and you don’t want them to be able to steal each others secrets?
Each one of those questions has different means of securing the computer. With question 1, it is not so much a matter of desktop environment, rather it has more to do with using full-disk encryption, setting a boot password in UEFI, and always having your lock screen enabled.
With question 2, this is a much more difficult task and you would probably be better off running apps in a VM, or carefully crafting your “Security Enhanced” Linux profile – or not using Linux at all, but using FreeBSD which allows you to run apps in jails.
With question 3, be more careful with filesystem permissions and access control lists, setup your sudoers file properly, and use a desktop environment with better security auditing like Gnome or KDE Plasma.
Never heard of these jails, like bubblejail? Its available on Linux too.
I know the question is vague and highly dependend on Threat model etc. Pre-enabled services, distribution adding stuff to it, SELinux confined user (not working with Plasma at all), xwayland support for keylogging chosen keys (Plasma).
Also GTK is widely used for rust apps, this doesnt exist on Plasma at all, not a problem though as Plasma is not Gnome and simply supports GTK normally.
I don’t think the DE itself matters, but I can recommend using an immutable OS (makes it harder to install malware) and installing flatpak apps only. You can also use software like flatseal to further lock down permissions
I’m starting to think people misunderstand what an “immutable” distro really does…
Please do share with me what I do not understand.
A mostly read only filesystem built from a limited number of packages, with other files being in a fixed number of locations mean it is harder for malware to hide.
